Conventional computer systems allow for the production and distribution of multimedia data, including video, audio and image data. Such production is increasing at a phenomenal rate due to the growing popularity of the Internet, the growing affordability of personal computers capable of efficiently processing multimedia data to provide a pleasing experience for users, as well as the fact that multimedia data is far superior to text-only data in conveying content-rich information.
People now access and use multimedia data in numerous ways. One way that people access multimedia data is over a network. For example, people using web browsers on personal computers now access multimedia data by surfing the World Wide Web via the Internet. Countless numbers of content providers link multimedia data to web pages accessible by people using web browsers. Today, persons using web browsers can access a web page from a web server operated by a content provider to view video clips, listen to audio clips, or view images made available by the content provider.
When a client requests a piece of media content such as digital video, audio, or some other sampled content from a server, the client typically provides the global address of the content in the form of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A server then accesses the content and sends or “streams” it to the client as a continuous data stream.
There are various file formats for streaming media content and composite media streams. Regardless of the streaming file format used, an individual data stream may contain a sequence of digital data sets or units. The units can represent an image, sound, or some other stimuli that is perceived by a human to be continuously varying. The client can render the units individually, or in sequence, to reproduce the original stimuli. For example, a video data stream includes a sequence of digitally specified graphics frames that are rendered in sequence to produce a moving picture.